Archive for ‘Authentication’

June 2nd, 2011

Active Directory Account Creation Mode in SharePoint 2010

by Tristan Watkins

Earlier this week, I had the misfortune of generating an error I’d never seen before when building a new SharePoint Server 2010 farm. The error first emerged when the SharePoint installation process landed me at the Farm Configuration Wizard page. I wouldn’t have been running it (not advisable ever, really), but it’s the first page that loads after the Product Configuration Wizard completes, so my first Central Administration page was this error:

The page cannot be displayed because your server’s current configuration does not support it. To perform this task, use the command line operations in Stsadm.exe.

How odd, given the emphasis on PowerShell in SharePoint 2010! After a bit of head scratching and examining application and ULS logs, I navigated to the Central Admin home page and everything appeared to be fine, but then when I got around to creating a new Site Collection a bit later, I got the same error, even though I was able to create web/service applications. I had the same error when logged on as farm admin, farm admin + local admin rights, farm admin + SQL SysAdmin and farm admin + domain admin rights, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a permission issue (and I should note my temporary fiddlery here is only really suitable for non-production environments). This error also occurred on some other Site Collection-specific pages.

read more »

February 9th, 2010

SharePoint Server 2007 cross-domain farm topologies

by Tristan Watkins

I’ve recently been involved in MOSS 2007 farm topology discussions with a client that was interested in using the Split back-to-back topology. After a lengthy troubleshooting and escalation process we’ve identified some problems with this TechNet extranet farm topology guidance in conjunction with Microsoft Tier 2 support. In short, the TechNet document identifies some supported topologies that span domains, but this incident has raised questions about:

  • The acceptable placement of server roles in those topologies.
  • Supported domain trust directions.
  • Alternate Access Mappings requirements.
  • Picking people from other domains.

This is an account of the relevant issues and the steps that we took to reach our conclusions. read more »

March 14th, 2009

Windows Time, the PDC Emulator and the VM

by Tristan Watkins

Or… why it’s important to disable Host Time Synchronisation on a domain controller.

A few months ago I reminded myself of a major gotcha when planning a virtual infrastructure. Assume that you run more than one domain in more than one forest and that trusts are in place to authenticate users across those forests. This could be a development/test/staging environment, or as will no doubt be more common in the coming years, it could be a virtualised infrastructure. read more »